After The Storm

For those who still read, a book on the real Outer BanksIn surf mag fantasy land: The Outer Banks is all S-Turns peaks and East Coast sunshine. There are always pros in town visiting. Every wave barrels. It is always time for ESA Easterns.In real life:There is an off-season. The crowds go home and conditions get stormy. Chris Bickford decided to document the year-round reality of Outer Banks existence in his new book After the Storm. “I was already shooting lots of landscapes,“ explains the New York Times contributor of his motivation. “Then I’d be in the water, surfing, and kept having those times where it was like, ‘God, I wish I had a camera out here.’ Those sessions where it was really late in the day, with just three people out — sun’s going down, sky’s beautiful — and I wanted to do something that captured the essence of the life and feeling of waiting around for the storms to come and storms to end. So I bought a housing, and spent the year catching all those in-between moments.”Shot totally in black-and-white in late or early hours and from an abstract perspective, Bickford’s book is a creepy series of silhouettes and ghostly figures as seen from the fringe. It’s a reminder that even when the scene goes dead, the Outer Banks are full of life.